Drinking, Gambling, and Making Merry: Waguih Ghali’s search for cosmopolitan agency

On the surface, Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964) reads as a typical postcolonial novel; the Francophone, British educated Egyptian Coptic protagonists struggle with their conflicting allegiances to the English culture that produced and imposed colonialism, and to the Egyptian revolution that opposed colonialism but also implemented repressive domestic policies. As this article argues, the novel ultimately rejects the mediated binaries of post-coloniality, searching instead for a notion of cosmopolitan identity, defined both as a historically and locally situated urban subject and as a politically engaged ‘citizen of the world’. After the publication of the novel, Ghali began writing another work, referred to in his papers as ‘the Ashl novel’, which remained incomplete at the time of his death. These papers, as this article argues, demonstrate Ghali’s further exploration of cosmopolitanism abandoning altogether the situatedness provided by national identity.